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Having it Both Ways

The Incompatibility of Narrative Identity and Communicative Ethics in Feminist Thought

Oxford University

As an alternative to post-structural accounts of ‘performative’ agency (e.g. Judith Butler), Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib and Maria Pia Lara) propose the idea of the narrative self. The concept of narrative is seen as a way of bridging the gap between the formalism of Habermas’s idea of communicative ethics and the dispersion that arises from the post-structural critique of the subject. The idea of the narrative self undoubtedly yields an active and creative account of agency. However, I argue that the attempt to reconcile a narrative concept of the self within a theory of communicative ethics results in a limited understanding of identity and agency in the context of the systemic reproduction of gender inequalities.

Key Words: agency • discontinuity • gender inequality • intersubjectivity • narrative synthesis

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, No. 6, 1-20 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276403206001


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